The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Only a year and a half later, after The Beatles had disbanded, George Harrison would organise just such an event that combined music with internationalist compassion, The Concert For Bangladesh, whose mission was to raise money to help people affected by floods on the Asian subcontinent. But on this winter’s day in Twickenham, he wasn’t noticeably inspired by his bandmate’s grandiose but well-meaning proposal to improve the lives of thousands of starving Africans. “Don’t they say charity begins at home?” he remarked.

  “So we will do it at George’s house,” Paul fired back.

  “Let’s do the show right here,” said Ringo, echoing the old movie cliche´.

  Picking up from his Biafran suggestion, Paul continued: “Say we were doing it in an airport: you could stop the people from coming and going. They’ve all got planes to catch; like, you get a lot of people all the time going for planes and looking. It would be a scene. Or in a hospital: they can’t get up – except at the finale, when John walks over to the little girl and says, ‘Come, ye,’ and she gets up and walks.”

  Paul was edging into biblical territory here, daring to suggest that the group – and John in particular – replicate one of the Miracles of Jesus, as when the Son of God raised Lazarus from the dead. Though this is likely to have been tongue-in-cheek, a casual jest to keep the desperately needed ideas for a live show rolling along, there were echoes here of John’s troublesome “Jesus” remark.

  Later, after they tinkered with a few half-hearted numbers, Paul addressed his frustrations with the attitudes of his old friends. “I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, got yourselves into this,” he said. “What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here? I’m here because I want to do a show, but I really don’t feel a lot of support.”

  Paul went on to deliver a petulant ultimatum. “There’s only two choices,” he said. “We’re going to do it or we’re not going to do it. And I want a decision. Because I’m not interested in spending my fucking days farting around here while everyone makes up their minds whether they want to do it or not. If everyone else wants to do it, great, but I don’t have to be here.” If the experience of this project ended up like that of the White Album, he said, maybe it should be their last venture together. “There’s no point in hanging on.”

  Overhearing some of these intense discussions was Paul Bond, the clapper boy of the three-man camera team filming the rehearsals. “There’s no question that there were these rows going on all the while, particularly between Paul and John. John really didn’t want to have anything to do with it all: he was ready to be off. And I remember one conversation, when Paul said something like, ‘Listen, we’re going to split up, we’ve all had enough of it.’ He had as well. ‘But we’ve got this contract. Let’s just finish this film and this album, let’s just get it done and then we can all fuck off.’ Which was quite a sensible way of looking at it, I thought.”

  One of the difficulties that rankled with Paul McCartney at the time was John’s persistent reticence. The former leader of The Beatles was now contributing very little to their discussions and allowing decisions to be made around him. The reasons for this acute passivity were tightly interlinked. Partly to blame were the deteriorating relationships between the four band members; another reason was John’s still-burgeoning, intimate and obsessive relationship with Yoko Ono; and yet another was the couple’s addiction to heroin.

  As the days trudged on, it was becoming painfully obvious that John’s songwriting was at a low ebb. On Wednesday, January 8, Paul confronted him directly about his lack of new material. “Have you written anything?” he asked as the spools of an audio-recorder turned nearby. He sounded like a schoolteacher berating a child for failing to do his homework.

  “No,” replied John.

  “We’re going to be faced with a crisis, you know.”

  “When I’m up against the wall, Paul, you’ll find me at my best.”

  Paul didn’t sound convinced. “Yeah, I know… but I just wish you’d come up with the goods.”

  “Look, I think I’ve got Sunday off.”

  “Yeah? Well, I hope you can deliver.”

  “I’m hoping for a little rock’n’roller… ‘Sammy With His Mammy’.”

  Whether Paul picked it up or not, John’s midweek suggestion that he may have time to write songs during the forthcoming weekend surely carried within it a hint of frustration and protest. Here they were every day, spending the daylight hours struggling with a handful of new songs and finding the slightest excuse to grind out cover versions of old favourites. A clear subtext of John’s statement was: if he could only have some time off on his own (or with Yoko), he could come back with perhaps two or three great new songs for the project. As it happened, John wouldn’t even have that Sunday free: much of it would be occupied with unexpected Beatles business.

  In interviews after The Beatles’ break-up, John claimed that songwriting had usually been a trial for him. In 1980, three days before he died, he told an interviewer that when he had looked over previous interviews, he realised “that I’m always complaining about how hard it is to write, or how much I suffer when I’m writing – that almost every song I’ve ever written has been absolute torture… I always think there’s nothing there, it’s shit, it’s no good, it’s not coming out, this is garbage… and even if it does come out, I think, ‘What the hell is it anyway?’”

  In the same interview, he claimed that he only had a week to write songs for Sgt. Pepper. It is surely no coincidence that his songs on that record, more than those on any other Beatles album, highlight the way he used “found materials” as starting-points for his songs. ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite’ has snatches of lyric lifted from a Victorian circus poster he found in a Sevenoaks antique shop, while his section of ‘A Day In The Life’ refers to a 1967 Daily Mail report on the preponderance of potholes in the roads of Blackburn, Lancashire, and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, despite that glaring LSD abbreviation, was prompted by a painting his son Julian brought home from school. If he wasn’t using found materials as inspiration, he was triggered by snatches of conversation, as when a discussion with the actor Peter Fonda during an LSD trip in 1965 sparked the lyric of ‘She Said She Said’.

  But there was little to ignite his creativity during those grey winter’s days in Twickenham, apart from his relationship with Yoko Ono. This had clearly inspired one of the songs he had brought to the table, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, which was given one decent full-band run-through that Wednesday. At the end of that performance, John gave one of his comical mock stage announcements. “God bless you, ladies and gentlemen,” he slurred. “I’d just like to say a sincere farewell from Rocky and The Rollers. This is Dirty Mac himself sayin’…” He was cut off as Paul suggested they have another crack at ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’. Dirty Mac had been the name of the supergroup featuring John and Yoko in The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus.

  One of the bands they had worked with on that production was The Who. And at the same time that The Beatles were slogging through oldies and scraps of new music at Twickenham, Pete Townshend and his bandmates were hitting new heights of creativity at IBC Studios in London’s Portland Place, where they were recording their fourth album, Tommy. All four members were pulling together to realise their leader’s lofty vision of a “rock opera” about the spiritual journey of the deaf, dumb and blind boy of the title. While The Beatles were insisting on going back to basics sonically, The Who were arranging and overdubbing furiously, Townshend playing keyboards as well as electric and acoustic guitar, and John Entwistle adding French horn, trumpet and flugelhorn as well as bass guitar, while their drummer Keith Moon was an orchestra unto himself, joyfully whacking timpani and a gong as well as a drum kit that boasted two bass drums. The finished oeuvre would include the unforgettable songs ‘Pinball Wizard’, ‘I’m Free’ and ‘See Me, Feel Me’ and take The Who into the realms of complex progressive rock: it even dared to begin with an �
��Overture’, and there was an ‘Underture’ for good measure too.

  The Moody Blues were also scheduled to record in a few days’ time. The former rhythm-and-blues outfit from the West Midlands would enter Decca Studios in West Hampstead to embark on their third concept album in succession. On The Threshold Of A Dream would use spacey sound effects, poetry and instruments such as cello, flute, piccolo, oboe, harmonica and Mellotron in addition to the standard set-up of vocals, guitar, bass and drums to explore the world of dreams.

  As The Beatles ground away on the soulless soundstage, they were still, as far as they were vaguely aware and as the film-makers and the group’s entourage believed, working towards a spectacular final concert. The date of Saturday, January 18, had been mooted, but was apparently giving way now to Monday, January 20. The only problem was, nobody had a clue where in the world they would be playing. Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Tunisian amphitheatre idea was still the favoured option, and Denis O’Dell’s rival Libyan amphitheatre proposal was floating around. Ethiopia was also mentioned. One day, Mal Evans told Kevin Harrington that the whole team would be going to Greece to film The Beatles’ live performances, but the next day Mal said those plans had been cancelled. “They talked about playing in the Grand Canyon as well,” says Chris O’Dell. “Coming from Arizona, I thought that would be cool.”

  Ringo suggested the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, at the southern end of Spain, bringing the possibilities a little closer to home once again. Also mentioned in the film studio later that Wednesday was Tahiti (where The Beatles had holidayed as a respite from Beatlemania back in 1964), though that may have been simply because its name alliterated with those two other mooted exotic locations, Tunisia and Tripoli.

  George complained that transporting all the equipment and the people to Tunisia was an “impractical” scheme, and Paul countered with an ambitious but reasonably practical idea: that the tickets for the show include transportation by sea for the spectators, by way of “a couple of boats, like the QE2”. That way, he enthused, the exotic overseas performance could become a reality. “Right! We get a nice time and a bit of sun.” This succeeded in perking up John, who reminisced about those blissful days in Rishikesh less than a year ago, when they sat on the roofs of the cottages where they were staying, singing and playing in the sunshine.

  “Paul’s idea was that they’d rehearse on the boat,” says Michael, “and that we would bring some of our audience with us. Although we would pick people up in Tunisia, we would bring an English contingent on the boat with us, which would sail from Liverpool to Tunisia, and of course then film the boat and the rehearsals on the boat. This is when the whole idea expanded to very extravagant proportions. But only The Beatles would’ve been capable of executing such a thing, because they had the money to do it – although it was quickly running out – if that’s what they wanted to do. They could probably have got it paid for by a television company anyway.

  “John was for it – I think back then, John was for anything that would get him out of the film studio and get him away from sitting with the other three. I think he’d already partly decided that he and Yoko would embark on a different artistic career. He was quite happy to be anywhere as long as he and Yoko were together, and he was happy to play the music and liked the idea of the amphitheatre. And Paul was for it, and I think Ringo thought there was something to it. But George was in a different position, really: I think he had gotten very fed up with touring after the 1966 tour, and he really just wanted to make an album. He didn’t want there to be a TV special, he didn’t want to be filmed, particularly; he wanted to work on the music.

  “If it sounds like George was a negative person, he wasn’t at all. In fact, he was very sweet, extremely affable, very interested in what you were thinking as well as what he was thinking; he was funny. But he definitely had opinions about what was right for them to do and for him to do, and by this time he was also feeling much more confident in stating those opinions. Originally he’d been the young one. Neil Aspinall told me the story that before they were The Beatles, John and Paul would walk along the street discussing their great ideas and George would be behind them, carrying the guitar cases. I actually liked George very much and found him very un-negative. But he was stubborn.”

  George dismissed the idea of using a boat, calling it “very expensive and insane”. It would have to be a “bloody big boat”, he said, laughing, “bigger than the Royal Iris!” The Royal Iris was a 159-foot-long Art Deco-style ferry that had hosted dance cruises known as “Riverboat Shuffles” on the River Mersey, and The Beatles had played on it four times between August 1961 and September 1962.

  John suggested they use “Aristotle’s yacht”, by which he meant the Christina O, a superyacht owned by the shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who had married Jackie Kennedy back in October. This was a 325-foot-long vessel that had been built in 1943 for the Canadian Navy, which had been lavishly refitted in the fifties and had hosted parties attended by such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.

  Despite George’s quibbles, the El Djem amphitheatre idea became the favoured option, and Michael Lindsay-Hogg recalls that it looked like it would really happen. “We got to the stage where we were all going to go to Tunisia. They’d already bought airline tickets for Mal and Neil to fly out there, to check the security issues in the hotels and stuff, do a recce.” Monday, January 13, was the date when Mal and Neil would be flying to Africa.

  “They were all talking about doing this concert,” says the technical engineer Dave Harries, “and I remember phoning people and trying to find a standby generator that could be shipped at very short notice out to somewhere.”

  Unsurprisingly, there seems to have been some confusion within The Beatles’ entourage between the two amphitheatres discussed – the one in Tunisia and the other in Tripoli. Mal Evans mentioned Tripoli rather than Tunisia in a ‘Mal’s Diary’ piece for The Beatles Book Monthly. Also, plans were mentioned for food to be transported to the site of the concerts from the same suppliers who helped to stock a nearby American air base. By far the most likely contender here is the Wheelus Air Base, a large facility on the coast of Tripoli that the Americans were still using in early 1969.

  The Beatles entered into a surreal discussion about adopting individual code names for their overseas voyage, such as the American Secret Service used for the president and other VIPs in radio and telephone messages. The current outgoing US president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was addressed by American spooks as “Volunteer”, and the president-elect, Richard Nixon, was “Searchlight”.

  The Beatles’ cyphers were the names of foreign countries – George was France and Ringo was Russia, for example – which caused some brief hilarity in the film studio. When Ringo’s code name was mentioned, John thought they were actually talking about playing in Russia, and there was similar confusion when George was addressed as France.

  “I think the code-name idea would have come from Paul rather than anyone else,” says Michael. “Sometimes there’d be an idea, and because their brains were those of musicians, they would riff on the idea as if it were a melody. So if the melody was ‘We’re all going to Tunisia,’ then one of them would say, ‘Hey, we should have code names so no one knows who we are,’ and then they’d go further into the thing and Paul or John would say, ‘George should be France, and Ritchie, you should be Russia, and I’ll be Scandinavia’ or whatever. That would’ve been more of a riff than a serious idea.”

  George may have taken to his code name more than the other three, because there are several photographs of him taken in the seventies, after The Beatles’ break-up, in which he is wearing a dark T-shirt with the word FRANCE emblazoned across it in white capital letters.

  Before they parted company that Wednesday in January, John reached his peak of enthusiasm for a foreign show, making a clear case to the others for “getting away from it all” for the conclusion of the project: “Every time we’ve done an album
at EMI, we ask, ‘Why are we stuck in here? We could be in LA, or in France!’ And every time we do it, and here we are again building a bloody castle around us.” A different location, he argued, would immediately remove the problem of deciding what “the gimmick” would be this time. “God’s the gimmick,” he said, fantasising that they could time their performance to coincide with a beautiful sunrise.

  On the next day, Thursday, Linda Eastman accompanied Paul into the studio. George arrived late, after 11 a.m., saying: “I was so hungry today, I had to be late just to eat my breakfast… if you want an excuse.” There were some discussions about playing the big show at Twickenham, and Paul was keen on making the rehearsals more realistic, to reflect where they would be standing and the positions of the amplifiers during the show. “Bass amps in the middle, do you think, and guitar on the side?” he asked. “It’s a bit silly rehearsing sitting, facing this way, when we’re actually going to play standing, facing that way. We should get into that.”

  This sensible idea wasn’t taken up by the other Beatles, and George filled the silence with a joke. “We’ve still got our dance steps to learn yet,” he quipped.

  “Oh yeah… and the jokes in between the numbers,” replied Paul.

  For the past six days they had been spending arguably too much time playing scrappy cover versions – songs by Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Smokey Robinson and even George Formby. But when George Harrison asked if they should play “other people’s tunes as well” during the live show, it was as if the idea had never crossed their minds.

  “I don’t know any,” claimed John.

  “I don’t like anybody else’s,” alleged Paul.

  Speaking apparently to George, John said: “I can only just bear doing your songs, never mind strangers’.”

  Here was another put-down for George, who was obviously blossoming as a songwriter but had been struggling to get John and Paul to rehearse some of his latest compositions during the sessions, even the sublime ‘All Things Must Pass’, which would become the title track of his chart-busting 1970 solo triple album. George recalled years later: “The problem was that John and Paul had written songs for so long that it was difficult. First of all, because they had such a lot of tunes, they automatically thought that theirs should be the priority. So, for me, I’d always have to wait through 10 of their songs before they would even listen to one of mine. That’s why All Things Must Pass had so many songs, because it was like, you know, I had been constipated.”